Time_traveller > Time_traveller's Quotes

“Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.”
― David Bohm

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.”
― David Bohm

“
Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture? ”
― David Bohm

“The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.”
― David Bohm

“There is a difficulty with only one person changing. People call that person a great saint or a great mystic or a great leader, and they say, 'Well, he's different from me - I could never do it.' What's wrong with most people is that they have this block - they feel they could never make a difference, and therefore, they never face the possibility, because it is too disturbing, too frightening.”
― David Bohm

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.”
― David Bohm

“some might say: ‘Fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fratricide, etc., are the reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive.’ But this is not what is being said here. Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man’s action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.”
― David Bohm, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory

“individual thought is mostly the result of collective thought and of interaction with other people. The language is entirely collective, and most of the thoughts in it are. Everybody does his own thing to those thoughts – he makes a contribution. But very few change them very much.”
― David Bohm, On Dialogue

“If each one of us can give full attention to what is actually ‘blocking’ communication while he is also attending properly to the content of what is communicated, then we may be able to create something new between us, something of very great significance for bringing to an end the at present insoluble problems of the individual and of society.”
― David Bohm

“What prevents theoretical insights from going beyond existing limitations and changing to meet new facts is just the belief that theories give true knowledge of reality (which implies, of course, that they need never change).”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“In the dialogue people should talk directly to one another, one to one, across the circle. Then the time would come, if we got to know each other a bit and could trust each other, when you could speak very directly to the whole group, or to anybody in it.”
― David Bohm, On Dialogue

“relativity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which all parts of the universe, including the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“In the long run it is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the actual fact is.”
― David Bohm

“A change of meaning is necessary to change this world politically, economically and socially. But that change must begin with the individual; it must change for him... If meaning is a key part of reality, then, once society, the individual and relationships are seen to mean something different a fundamental change has taken place. (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)”
― David Bohm

“When it is found (as generally happens) that what is observed is only similar to what he had in mind and not identical, then from a consideration of the similarities and the differences he gets a new idea which is in turn tested. And so it goes, with the continual emergence of something new that is common to the thought of scientists and what is observed in nature.”
― David Bohm, On Dialogue

“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved—by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, "enlightened" individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal —carries the cross of the redeemer— not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Only birth can conquer death—the birth , not of the old thing again, but of something new .”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilate passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as a king through all the rooms of his house. And therein lies his power to save; for his passing and returning demonstrate that through all the contraries of phenomenality the Un-create- Imperishable remains, and there is nothing to fear (93).”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces